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LOS ANGELES — There was precious little science to goaltending, even a generation ago.

Bill Ranford, the Los Angeles Kings goalie coach who won the Conn Smythe Trophy for the Edmonton Oilers in 1990, remembers quite clearly who the organization’s positional instructor was at the time.

“Nobody,” he said Thursday, as the Kings and St. Louis Blues skated at Staples Center in preparation for Game 3 of their Western semifinal.

“We just talked to each other — Fuhrsie (Grant Fuhr) when we played together, and Freddie the Brat (Brathwaite) and Joaquin (Gage). We tried to help each other out.”

So when the Kings first assigned Ranford to work with Jonathan Quick in Reading of the East Coast league, he saw something of himself in the kid from University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

“He was all athletic. I know ... pot calling the kettle black, right?” Ranford said. “It gets very tiring, fatigue sets in in your legs, and it’s hard on your body, so I had first-hand knowledge of it. We felt it was important to bring a little more technical aspect to his game, and just calm his game down a little bit so he’d be in position for the second save.

“He put in a lot of time and effort with the technical part, understanding the game better, reading plays — and now the athletic side of it is a secondary asset, a go-to asset when it’s needed.”

Quick was, well, a quick study.

“Unbelievable,” said Ranford, 45. “My first year in Reading, we’d work on something in the morning and he’d apply it that night. I could never do that, but he did.”

“The first time I saw him play, my first pre-season game as a King, we were in Kansas City, they let him play the whole game and nobody knew who he was, practically,” recalls Jarret Stoll. “I think we won 2-1 and he made like 44 saves. He played unbelievable.

“He just battles. He’s so flexible and athletic, and sometimes it may look lucky, but he gets himself in position to make the save, and he works for it.”

Up 2-0 on the Blues, the Kings have had plenty of contributors to their six playoff wins to date, but none bigger than Quick, whose 6-1 record, 1.56 goals-against average and .952 save percentage have him in a very elite class among goalies still playing.

"The difference between a good goalie and a great goalie is, a great goalie will make all the saves he's supposed to and a few he's not supposed to,” said Kings captain Dustin Brown. "That's what he's given us.”

“There’s always a push in the playoffs, a team can always put together a good 10-minute push, or a period, and that’s when you need your composure, and it starts with the goalie making the timely save to calm things down,” said Stoll.

Blues coach Ken Hitchcock, while quite capable of spreading a goodly bit of blarney about the opposition, sounds genuine in his praise of Quick, and even compares his style to a couple of the all-time greats.

“Awkward style, unbelievable focus on finding the puck,” said Hitchcock. “I know not everybody likes Don Cherry — I do — but his description and video montage of Terry Sawchuk is right on the money.

“The way Sawchuk played goal, that’s exactly how Jonathan Quick plays, and that’s a helluva goalie, and we got to find ways to beat him. He never quits on a puck. He's like an old-school goalie. He reminds me a little bit of Marty Brodeur.”

There’s a little something called longevity still missing in those comparisons, but as a Vezina Trophy finalist, with Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist and Nashville’s Pekka Rinne, the 26-year-old Quick long ago stopped being a flash in the pan. He carried a low-scoring Kings team through some horribly dry stretches of the season.

At 6-1, Quick is not big like Rinne or Phoenix’s Mike Smith, but he plays low and wide, and his lateral movement is stunning. He doesn’t play the conventional, structured butterfly style of many a larger man, so he’s not just a positional blocker who gets his torso in the way.

The top 10 goalies in these playoffs all have (or had) save percentages higher than .920. Half of them have GAAs under 2.00.

So goaltending is big, but both Quick and Ranford acknowledge that the stats don’t all belong to the goalie.

“It's a credit to the way these guys play in front of me," the reticent Quick said when the Vezina news came out the other day. “Goaltender is more dependent on your teammates than any other position in sports.”

“What’s changed most of all is the shot-blocking,” said Ranford. “All the shot-blocking used to happen [far from the net], you had the [Craig] Ludwigs and the [Rod] Langways of the time, and the Kevin Lowes and Craig Munis, and a lot of it was lying down and getting in front of shots.

“But now, it’s all six guys. Everybody fronts the puck. Phil Housley made a career out of wristing the puck through and getting points. Doesn’t work any more. Everyone fronts the puck and gets in the shooting lane, and that’s why you see all the broken feet and hands.”

For all that, Ranford said, goal scoring hasn’t changed so much.

“You look at every single team that’s been successful in the playoffs: there’s only one way to score, and that’s put as many people as you can in front of the net. The goalies are too good,” he said.

“It was a lot harder to get to the net when I played because the D-men and forwards were allowed to hold up. But if you go back on highlights, the way you score was always dirty, and it hasn’t changed.

“As a goaltender, you gotta work whatever magic you can to try to find the puck.”

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L.A. Kings star a Quick study in net, in an elite class of goaltenders

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